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on monday, new York Times It was reported that the White House was considering having the government review the AI model before release. to casual the verge Readers, it appears that it has completely reversed donald trumpPolicies of. Over the past year, he had been a vocal supporter of pro-industry deregulation by ousting former President Joe BidenMassive executive orders on AI security, removing export controls on advanced chips, and signing executive orders that would legally punish states for passing and enforcing AI laws in a vacuum of federal law. Now, the Trump administration has done a 180, demanding federal oversight and scrutiny of pre-market models.
But for Washington, the change in White House policy was due to three major changes. First, the mythos of Anthropic has indeed frightened the national security apparatus, forcing the administration to confront a new threat: the possibility of adversaries using American AI models to attack America’s public and private sectors. Second, other countries are now beginning to make their own AI rules, possibly in a way that will go against the interests of the United States. (And yes, “destroying a Big Tech data center in a targeted drone strike” Is One way to get around government AI regulation, but we’ll get to that shortly.)
And third, david sax He was ousted from his job as AI and crypto czar, leaving Silicon Valley with one less mechanism for Trump to present an industry-friendly, “innovation at all costs” agenda.
The definition of political influence can be sloppy and amorphous, especially around Donald Trump, who will take anyone’s phone call and act on that advice if he feels like it. (remember when Laura Loomer Had control over the National Security Council?) But what is legally certain is that Sachs, a billionaire venture capitalist and fundraiser for Trump in 2024, no longer has the privileges available as a special government employee, such as the ability to review sensitive information, the ability to speak on behalf of the White House, or the ability to have official influence over government employees and agencies.
Instead, the “Special Government Servant”, who was supposed to spend only 130 days working in the administration and somehow managed to stay on for a full year, actively weakened the administration and strained its relations with its political allies. During Sachs’s tenure, the White House moved beyond simply advocating less regulation. He tried twice to get Congress to block state AI laws, and failing that, tried to use an executive order that would give the Trump administration powers to sue states that pass or enact said laws. But his Valley-esque tactics, to say nothing of his efforts to consolidate power over AI policy by ousting existing agencies, angered Republicans and MAGA allies, while alienating vast portions of Trump’s base. (In fact, it was so unsuccessful that when unnamed White House officials recently attempted to pressure some red states to drop pending AI legislation, claiming they were going against Trump’s agenda, four GOP state lawmakers spoke out on the record. wall street journal instead. Again, if the agenda was just to kill those bills in the cradle, it succeeded.)
Even if Sachs didn’t crash and burn — to say nothing of publicly criticizing Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t like criticism, for continuing the war against Iran — it’s going to be difficult for even a part-time employee maintaining ties to the private sector to handle the job. In recent months, the scope of US AI policy has broadened far beyond the scope of Sachs’s pro-Innovation 2025, into areas where a lack of regulation would be wildly irresponsible: national security and geopolitical stability.
A major turning point was the leaking of Anthropic’s Mythos, an AI model that was so powerful at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company, whose reputation rests on acting more responsibly than its competitors, refused to release it to the public. The prospect of a Mythos-level model becoming commercially available terrified the national security apparatus and the financial industry, and attracted the attention of three powerful people in the White House: the Treasury Secretary Scott BesantCommerce Secretary Howard Lutnickand Chief of Staff Susie Wills.
When Besant and Wills met the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei In April, it signaled that not only were they taking the threat seriously, but they were now gaining on Anthropic’s enemies in the Pentagon, who months earlier had convinced Trump that Anthropic was “woke” and should be banned for government use.
“It’s hard to deny the national security implications of something like Mythos, and it’s not easy to politicize legitimately urgent national security issues,” Charlie BullockA senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI said The Verge. “Once people with serious national security concerns get involved, it’s hard to dismiss or politicize the issue.”
In recent weeks, federal agencies that were ousted by Sachs are now being given more powers. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department announced that it has designated the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) as the agency that will conduct pre-deployment testing on commercial frontier AI models before release, and has already reached agreements with XAI, Microsoft, and Google DeepMind. CAISI is run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which was dismantled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last year, but recruitment for technical positions has begun.
Other countries are also increasing their power in a way that the United States cannot directly control. The EU is currently debating amendments to the AI Act, and although EU countries and the European Parliament were unable to reach an agreement in recent talks, whatever does Ultimately the enactment of that law will have a direct impact on how frontier AI models are developed – and possibly in a way that inadvertently works against US business and NatSec interests.
“[Bessent] “It’s really not something the Europeans like,” said a technology policy adviser close to the administration. The Verge. In his view, the EU’s proposed privacy rules will not only hurt American companies, but it will also inadvertently allow China to grow faster, and this is a historical precedent: “We’ve seen this movie before when it came to broadband, where they tried to do the same thing to American broadband companies. In the end, they were just helping Huawei.”
Then there are the evil geopolitical players who don’t care what sex or the US government thinks. Days after US forces bombed Tehran and killed its religious leader, Iran carried out drone attacks on two AWS data centers in the UAE and indirectly damaged a third data center in Bahrain, causing major power outages and damage to critical infrastructure across the Middle East. A few weeks later, Iranian state media announced it would directly target 18 major US tech companies with a presence in the region, including AI heavy hitters like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and Nvidia, and has since claimed it has targeted Oracle data centers in the UAE. (UAE media later clarified that an Oracle building in Dubai had suffered minor damage from debris fallen from the aerial drone interception.)
“Although in the United States, where Maine is, there is a lot of politics around it [trying] banning them, and [Republican Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis There’s talk of banning them because, as far as the world is concerned, it’s critical infrastructure,” a technology policy adviser close to the administration told me. “And that’s why one of the first things the Iranians did was not just a bomb, but a bomb.” Two According to the company, the damage to AWS’s data centers, which serve the entire Middle East, is so severe that even if the war ended now, it would take “several months” to resume full operations.
However, this does not mean that David Sacks said No Influence in the Trump administration: He has Trump’s direct cell, and he’s still a billionaire CEO, which is better credentials in Trump’s eyes than any kind of expertise. atlantic‘S george packer Recently a huge feature was published on Sachs, highlighting his wealth-seeking persistence. In fact no one can stop the Lord of the Universe from trying to bow again and again. But when it comes to Trump’s favorite rich people, the sex may not even stack up. Last week Trump organized a state banquet king charles iiiTrip to the United States. Guest list includes Tim Cook, jensen huang, jeff bezos, Marc Andreessen, marc benioffThe corporate leadership of Meta and Alphabet – and no Sachs, who was present at the last state banquet held at Windsor Castle in the United Kingdom last year while he was still in the White House.
When I asked a D.C. insider familiar with the politics of the state dinner whether Sachs was invited, the answer was pretty clear: “Why would he be? He’s not in the White House inner circle.”
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